I was lost in the darkness of a dreamless sleep, not so dissimilar to my soul. I was at peace, it was very nice. I was so relaxed that I didn’t even care to pay attention. My aches and everything the violently bad pins and needles had done begain to slip away in sleep.

I felt so empty, but it was a good empty.

It was just me with time to catch my breath in a dream.

And then, with a noise that sounded like a curtain, and Sophy shouted, “We both know you’re not here to level up, so get. You’re not safe out there, so Wake up, Idiot.”

She spoke in that voice that was not so much words as pure soul-shaking authority, and like a vampire in an ancient crypt, my eyes cracked open, bleary and confused. I was being shaken and shouted awake by both Anna and Selly, one normally, the other leaning against my nose like a wall, kicking me with her heel.

“Huh?” I said with a yawn that stretched the question out.

“Wake up, you gore slicked-” “-Saphine, what’s wrong with-” “-I’ll stab you with m-” “-I swear I’ll cry if you-” “-Beat your ass if you-” “-Why does this blood reek-” “-Blood in your teeth-”

“What fresh hell is this?” I said, confused at the reaction, lifting myself up with my arms.

I was confused, drowsy, and a little sore, and I felt like I was an 80-year-old with grit in my mouth. First was the Anna, who I scooted up against, which immediately got her to stop shaking me.

I wasn’t sure if our magnetic feeling was both ways, but it sure felt like it was.

“Why are you always coming back to me covered in blood?” She asked, shaken. I could tell she was still shaky; from the attack or from the blood I kept getting myself covered in, I couldn’t tell.

“I really need to learn a spell to clean myself, don’t I?” I asked her.

“That’s a massive waste of mana when you can just wash yourself,” she said, bonking her head into mine.

“Yeh, but it would make moments like this way less gross,” I told her, pressing my head back into hers.

“That’s all good and nice and all, but tell me, A, why were you unaffected, and b, why is there blood In your teeth?” Selly practicaly shouted.

She was still only a few inches tall, so it wasn’t loud, but she was furious.

“It was a spiritual attack,” I told her, “And apparently, my soul is made of stronger stuff.”

“Birdshit,” Selly said, and I ignored them; she was shaken as well, though not as much as the others.

“And the second was… Well, I lost my cool attacking the Gremlin [Cultists]…”

“And you mauled them?” She asked, confused.

“Yes,” I told her. I lacked a better phrasing than mauled, besides maybe hunted, which was not better, “One of them got on my back, so I let my instinct out.”

“Hells, I can’t say they didn’t deserve it… What's with the kid?”

“They were doing something. I have no clue what for sure, but I got her out,” I told her.

Something seemed to dawn on Anna then, and she turned toward the loudest of those among us. I looked backward, craning my neck, and saw Strause curling in on himself.

Anna hopped up, and I followed, drawn to her, catching Selly in my hand.

Smoothly, we covered the short ground, the little furball following Anna from a distance.

Strause was in the fetal position, clutching at himself, choking on breath.

Anna genuinely looked torn about him as she looked him over. Selly seemed totally uncaring, mostly mumbling something to herself that I didn’t care to pay attention to. I was trying to figure out why Strause was still in so much pain.

I felt a bit icky, kind of like a numb limb; Selly was more so, she still felt it and was now extra pissy. Anna was twitchy, and most of the guards were recovering. The [Butcher] next to him seemed the best out of everyone but me; and he was the only one I didn’t think had folded.

“Srause, come on, take a few breaths… Why are you here? You never answered my question,” She told him, reaching out to lay a hand on his shivering form.

It seemed a little cold of Anna, but I didn’t really know what their deal was.

“Yeah, got cut off… There's a monster between here and the wall if you go straight there… The [Hunters], the good ones, will be able to drive it off, but for now, they are holding a third of the city, so only the weaklings can keep it pinned down. You’re going to need to cut through the temple district and cut back.”

She listened to her brother as he got it in him to sit up, all of us pulling back a bit to not crowd him.

“Say, why did that hit you so hard?” I asked him.

“Why didn’t it hit you hard?” he asked, raising a brow.

“Because my soul is made of material beyond mortal make,” I told him, “But your Human, I can’t help but see a weird pattern where the rest of the normal Humans were wounded but fine, and the four of us,” I told him pointing between the three people whos name started with S, and the big [Butcher], who I had forgotten the name of and desperately didn’t want to insult by asking for it again.

“Well, why is she weird?” he asked, pointing at Selly.

“Because she’s a Sprite,” “probably has enough Spirit to best ten men,” me and the [Butcher] said at about the same time.

We turned to him, and he raised his hands.

“I’m the highest level here, that’s probably the deal... Still…”

Still, there was no way Strause was that low a level. The literal child next to us was less ripped up than Strause.

Anna softened as we talked, asking, “Will you be alright, Strause?”

Strause took a deep breath, seemed to put on his fake face again, and he said something like, “I’ll be fine-” before Anna slapped him.

“Don’t you dare lie to me, little brother. I’m an adult, not some toddler suckling her mother's teat. Save me the bullshit, I want the truth.”

Cupping his cheek, Strause dropped the mask, his face growing into a rictus of pain.

All of us, every single one of us was in utter disbelief. I had never seen Anna so much as raise her hand to hit a fly, and here she was, slapping her brother hard enough to get him to drop his mask.

And we just kept staring, even Strause was staring.

“Don’t look at me like that, tell me. Tell. Me,” she enunciated at him.

He spoke very quietly, “I will… Eventually… It’s just too loud right now.”

He was… chastened, so very fragile sounding. It was as if, for a moment, he resembled his mana. A shell that was hollow on the inside, as if you could push through him, and he would shatter like glass.

Anna nodded her head.

“I can’t say I understand… But I will take your advice Strause. If you came out here to send me toward the temples, I’ll go to the temples,” She said her voice turning soft again, “and don’t go back into your shell either… Little brother.”

There was something exchanged there, hidden in those words that I didn’t know I would ever get.

Then, she stood up with a quick, “Sorry for slapping you, Strause,” and started to order her meagre people with her.

Strause huffed to himself, more in the moment, “No, you’re not,” before raising his voice and telling Anna, “The temple of Life has people healing; bring the wounded with you.”

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He stood, dusting himself off, trying to look like he hadn’t just screamed his lungs out over.

Anna, hearing that, or already thinking it, turned to the [Butcher] after letting off a volley of shouts and asked, “Who can you spare? I don’t think we can move the wounded on our own.”

“With the undead pushed back? I think we can lose eight but only two pikes; the rest will need to be clubs or swords. I won’t ask why you need them, I think I know.”

She raised her eyebrows, and I looked back and forth, not getting it. To my great relief, Anna didn’t seem to understand either.

He pointed at Anna’s staff before tapping his head.

We didn’t understand that either, but the Crossbowman grunted in approval, which set off a grunting competition between him and the butcher that only ended when we left them to do whatever it was that they did.

Men folk could get like that sometimes. I had once been told that there was a language of grunts that women couldn’t understand, but I didn’t take it seriously. It was, after all, told to me by Kindly, and Skip objected until Kindly pointed out how women could talk about things without mentioning them with a story about other stuff.

I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t know what these two were talking about either, so I let it go.

Instead, I moved up to the bitten and the wounded.

The one that was too far gone was gone now. His body writhed against the tight cordage.

I could feel his soul pressed down below his body.

I speared his heart and flipped him over, away from his wounded comrades and reached down to pick up the soul… And it bit me.

Cussing, I pulled back and scowled at it, then I scooped it up with my shovel.

Then I did it again after I dropped it once, but I got the hang of it from there.

They were still dying, and I hadn’t been able to save one of them. The less injured of them was now almost as bad as the now-dead man was, and I had used more mana. I didn’t even think I had enough to help him as I did.

So, as the soldiers got the bodies moving, I turned inward and followed along after the wounded man.

If I could not heal him with mana alone, I would heal him with a spell. I just didn’t know a spell to help him.

Or did I?

What was a spell? Magic, perhaps, was a bit too wiggly an explanation. A spell was more like a skill that you got without levelling. A custom manipulation of mana efficiently, as opposed to manhandling it like I could. Like one of those Anima bits that Sophy had talked about.

So, how did I use mana manipulation to make a spell?

It's also not so difficult, surely? I probably did something similar once when I created the [Magi] skill.

I didn’t know how it had worked, but if a spell was like a skill, and I had made a skill, surely, I could make a spell. I had learned several of them already.

Surely.

I just… Didn’t know how yet.

It made me want to pull out my hair, short as it was now that I had cut it. Pulling my ears, I furiously thought, staring at the man as I watched him slowly die.

I turned on [Gaze of the Coming Spring] and watched the man in greyscale, thinking about the way that I had squeezed the dark out of him like the last drop of water from a skin on a warm, sweaty day.

Could I feel it out? I had been manipulating mana the first time, I had just felt out the pieces, focusing on the manipulation and the methods of casting. I started doing that, only for nothing to happen. You could just learn a spell by casting it for the first time. It was not all that difficult.

SO WHY WAS THIS NOT THE SAME!

Good gods above, why was this different?

“Ughh, what is wrong with this?” I murmured darkly.

“What's wrong with what?” Anna asked from beside me.

I nearly shit myself, my tension getting the better of me. I turned to her as I hoped, Anna and Selly on her shoulder, looking wide at my antics. I felt a terrible wave of embarrassment run through me as I quickly said, “Nothing.”

Anna looked at me and said, “Nothing wrong with anything, or what is wrong with nothing?”

I didn’t understand what she was on about, so I just said, “Uhh… Nothing?”

She was not satisfied with my answer and waved her hand in a circular motion, a come here if I had ever seen it.

I leaned in, and Anna, quick as a whip, lightly flicked my nose, causing me to lean back.

“None of that, out with it, Saphine,” She told me seriously.

“You’re acting funny,” I told her, and before she could argue in response, I jumped in, giving it to her as my student tithe. I began to explain what I had done, but my thoughts quickly began to run up against the walls of what I knew about magic, very little, and what I didn’t know, which was a whole lot more than what I did.

I was trying to explain my thoughts on making a spell to do it when Anna pressed a finger against my mouth, once again causing me to lean back reflexively to get her finger off my nose.

After my neck was almost bent back as far as I could go, Anna pulled her finger off. I kept my eyes trained on the finger, making sure she wasn’t about to return it to my nose.

“Saphine, when you learned the spells you learned, what were you shaping? The effect, or the spell?”

“The spell?” I told her, confused.

“And what were you just focusing on?”

“The spell?” I told her, more confused than before.

She looked at me like I was, perhaps just a little dense and reiterated, “You were messing with the mana, Saphine; the point of a spell is to do that for you. There is also the fact that you might not be shaping it right.”

“But how does that… Oh…”

That made more sense. If I was focusing on the mana, I was focusing on the wrong thing, I wasn’t focusing on the spell.

What the hell was a spell anyway? A shape? Was that all it was? Some kind of magical tool that did one job?

I didn’t have time to think about the nature of a spell.

Taking Anna’s advice, I turned back toward the man and began to focus on the pattern I made as I moved the mana, minute twitches and swivels of my hand guided by [Magi]. I burned through mana as I adjusted my movements to improve them, making first one, then dozens of tiny improvements until, in the air, a kind of looping pattern began to form.

Once I had gotten it, I stopped manipulating the mana, stopped expending tons of mana to just practice and started moving the pattern until I could feel it vibrating in me and I arranged it.

It was almost ready.

“I think I’ve got it,” I told her, focusing so closely I almost tripped.

“Good now feed it the right mana,” she said.

The… The right mana?

“Anna, what are you talking about?” I whispered to her.

“Most of the spells you’ve cast are not mana type dependent. But you can’t cast a fireball with only your mana, you have to feed the spell the right kind of mana,” she told me. “You use your mana to fill the spell, but if there’s none of the right kind of mana in its shape, it's wasted. It will just reach the normal mana out and do nothing. Fire ball becomes a fart in the wind as it tries to compress thin air.”

Oh… Oh shit.

“Can I use the mana inside of him?” I asked her, only for her to give me a strange look.

“You shouldn’t be able to reach into someone in the first place. As fascinating as that is, Saphine, I don’t think you should, even if you could. We need mana inside of us.”

“We’ll shit,” I told her.

We stared at each other awkwardly. Both of us realized that neither of us had a casual source of death mana just on hand, like a spare coin in a purse.

Think Saphine, Think. How can I get some death mana? Can I get it from myself?

I checked myself, finding a whole lot of nothing dark inside of me other than where the bite and clawing had wrecked me. Quite the opposite of what it sounded like, as a [Saint of Death], I had almost no death mana in me. In fact, I couldn’t spot any, even in the wound, which, while darkened, was already slowly fixing itself, using up life mana, only to be fed with more life mana.

I looked at Anna, but I couldn’t use her, even if she wanted me to, so I looked around for Death Mana and found basically none.

Most of the death mana was just dispersed. All the light and dark spots spread into one another. The only real points where any death at all existed were in the wood of the nearby buildings, and even that was minimal, much of the wood alive with termites or mold.

Could I pull enough? Could I do it with my mana? I didn’t think so.

I was floating in the hundreds range already, I didn’t think I had the ability to just pull the mana for the spell, even if I could do it properly.

So where would I get the mana?

Something about it made no sense to me that a [Saint of Death] would have so much life mana when we got death magic.

Wasn’t it obvious? My mind told me. Life feeds Death, as Death feeds Life.

I tried to parse my strategy thoughts, trying to find out why that made any sense at all. And then it did.

I had lots of life mana. Life mana became Death mana. I had a source of death mana that would renew again and again. My entire body could be used to make it.

“Oh my gods,” I whispered, “I think I got it.”

Now… How did I do it? Where did I spend that mana? I needed to pull the energy off of the life mana in my body. I couldn’t even die if I used all the life mana in my body up. I would just come back.

Could I just… Use it to heal me?

I tried bumping the mana around my muscles, and they felt a little better, but it didn’t do anything. All it did was give me energy. Adding life mana to my body right at a big wound had only done so much before, and I felt like it did very little to actually heal the bites as I tried those. I just didn’t have enough in me to heal it with any speed, and if I dumped all of it into my body, I would start to get growths, apparently. Tumors had been mentioned as one of the side effects of pure life mana.

So where could I dump it without causing myself to turn into one great big tumorous growth?

Then I looked at my emptying mana pool and realized I had plenty of stuff I could pour the mana in; after all, I had poured death mana into it before while I had been seriously hurt and had it in spades.

Reaching inside and hoping I wasn’t about to waste a whole hell of a lot of mana, I pulled the life mana around my guts toward my mana reserves and held them there.

At first, it did nothing, but then, slowly, the energy seeped through and began to rub off on the reserves. It began to transfer its energy, and the mana within began to increase like it did when I pulled the death mana in, growing. Blooming.

It wasn’t a lot, and as it did suck the life from me, my gut began to have a queasy pain, as if I had gotten an ulcer. It got worse as I continued, my breath hitching as the death mana gnawed at me, a patch of light life mana ebbing to dark.

It wasn’t a great conversion; it raised it by only a fraction, but it did it, bringing me up enough that I felt solid in casting.

Making sure to line everything up, I pulled the mana up from inside of me, filling the loop that shaped into a flowery pattern, and I felt the tug of the spell, seeking mana to project. I pulled the dead mana from my gut, up, up to the spell where it was sucked in along the petals.

It lurched, folding out and pressed into him, flooding his body with extra death mana that wrapped around and squeezed.

The black pool within him met black death mana and annihilated the stagnant mana, enfolding it and shrinking violently until it formed a bud of sorts. And then, it popped, flooding in a jet out of the man's body, out of his shoulder as visible black ichor that reeked of foul muck.

Even as it landed on the cobbles, it began to warp the paving stones, warping and whipping around until it slithered into the ground beneath, one end quickly budding before blooming into a droopy black flower with an iridescent shine. Its roots, full of dark magic, shunted into the ground, spreading it until it lightened, the dark magic gone, returned to the natural state of things.

There were a few shouts as the reeking muck startled the [Guards]. My guts were in agony, the entire area very thoroughly dead, and I didn’t care all that much about that either. I was focused on the new spell I had spoken as I cast it.

[Deathly Bloom].

And then I ran out of the high, and my mana, and I collapsed again.